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LA Weekly August 1-7, 1997 Born in Flames Waco Texas, revisited by Manohla Dargis Waco: The Rules of Engagement is a documentary with politics as fierce as they are brave, a rare combination in today's blanded-out, ready-for-PBS marketplace. Directed by former sound editor William Gazecki, the documentary is a flawed if fully convincing inquiry into the government raid that left close to 80 members of a tiny Texas congregation dead in the springs of 1993. Watching it is unsettling, not only for what is says about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firemars, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Clinton administration and certrain members of the House, but for what it never quite articulates about the creation of murderous lunatics like Timothy McVeigh. The history of the Branch Davidians reaches back to 1782 and the birth of William Miller, a preacher whose legacy of apocalyptic Christianity includes the Seventh-day Adventist Curch. In 1934, Seventh-day Adventist Victor T. Houteff broke with the church and moved outside of Waco, Texas, where he and a handful of followers founded the first Mount Carmel community. The splinter church later incorporated as the Davidian Seventh-day Adventists and through the years underwent various transformations, some violent. David Koresh, a Seventh-day Adventist born Vernon Wayne Howell, joined the Davidians in 1981. By the time the ATF descended on Mount Carmel in February 1993, about 100 Branch Davidians were living together at what they called "Ranch Apocalypse," a multicultural, multiracial collective of true believers who didn't eat pork, grew their own food, lived off the profits of an auto-repair shop and a firearms business, and believed themselves Students of the Seven Seals, an arcane eschatology that put Koresh at its center. A fast, at times breathless patchwork of original and archival footage, The rules of Engagement is nothing in not completist. In addition to a persuasive round of expert testimony--from Bible scholars and lawyers to a Harvard law professor and a night-vision specialist--there are on- camera testimonials taken from the '95 Judiciary Hearing Committee investigating the Mount Carmel raid, along with video footage shot by the Davidians themselves with a camera supplied by the FBI. The conclusions are devastating. A former ATF deputy director states to the Judiciary Committee that the agency's "planning for Waco and the manner in which is was done was done for the purpose of publicity." A member of the committee complains that key evidence has disapperaed, including the ATF's own video of the February assault and the compound's bullet-ridden front doors. An incredulous Texas Ranger testifies that after the final April conflagration, the FBI, which was called in after the ATF, razed what was left of the compound, in effect destroying the crime scene. As Mount Carmel and its inhabitants burned, the ATF ran its colors up the Branch Davidian flagpole. Since its premiere last January at Sundance, The Rules of Engagement has been trimmed by almost a half hour. Now 136 minutes, the documentary feels a bit rushed, as if Gazecki couldn't bear to let a shred of evidence go, yet couldn't quite fit it all in, either. Throughout, however, his tone remains controlled; he lets the sheer weight of the evidence make its own angry argument. Conspicuously missing is any mention of McVeigh, whose own rage over Waco tripled the casualties when he bombed a federal building two years to the day after the April 19 assault. Still, what Gazecki and his producers do manage is not just laudable, it's heroic. The depressing sight of the Judiciary Committee falling along partisan lines--with almost all of the Democrats eager to demonize Koresh even as they forgive the ATF and the FBI each one of their mistakes--is in itself a small masterpiece of documentary truth telling. © 1997 LA Weekly

 


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